Memoir writer. Expat. Millennial. Sarcastic as hell. Black & female. Survived love, loss, and trauma—now turning it into two raw, funny, heartfelt books.
A simple mantra has echoed in my mind for weeks: I’m not new to this. I’m true to this.
As I dive deeper into memoir writing and establishing my brand, Brittany Brown Writes, imposter syndrome lurks in the background, whispering: You won’t get this done. You’re not good enough. Nobody cares.
My rational part knows that these are just doubts trying to break me down. However, tangible reminders throughout my life have shown me that writing has always been my purpose.
My Writing Roots: From Childhood Stories to Fan Fiction Fame and Reviews That Paid
I’ve been writing since I was five. I still remember my first “story”—bare bones and barely coherent, but I was proud. Writing became my lifeline, something I’ll share more about in Extraordinary Machine, where I’ll dive deeper into how writing saved me and shaped my life.
As a teenager, I started writing beyond the pages of my diary or Nana’s old Windows 95 programs like Word and MS Publisher (oh, I made so many fake newspapers for our amusement). I discovered Epinions, a site where I wrote music reviews and earned enough to fund my CD obsession. Over a decade, I wrote over 400 reviews there.
I also have an embarrassingly extensive career as a Harry Potter fan fiction writer. I would downplay it, but I looked at the site the other night, and it still lives online. My longest story (71k words) has over 120,000 views, a solid 5-star rating amongst 172 readers, and fan art! I still get emails from people asking if I’ll update fics I abandoned in 2009. I won’t share the URL, but if you’re clever, you’ll find it.
When Epinions shut down, I pivoted to writing about video games on Hubpages, earning up to $900 USD monthly at one point. Laziness—and that relentless imposter—made me slow down, but I still earn residuals today. A few weeks ago, I got a $90 payment for articles I wrote years ago. That’s not bad, especially when that money goes into my publishing fund.
My Journey to Memoir Writing and Establishing Brittany Brown Writes
This a private journal entry from October 2009, when I first dreamed of turning my life into a memoir. Some info is redacted, and excuse the typos!
I’ve always dreamed of being a published author but never thought I could sit down and actually do it. I always thought that fiction wasn’t my strength (though now that I’ve embraced my calling as a writer, my creativity has flourished, and I now have two children’s book ideas).
Sure, E.L. James made it big off what was essentially Twilight fan fiction with the Fifty Shades series. Still, I wasn’t going to try and publish my Harry Potter fics (though, if we get down to it, isn’t The Cursed Child just a glorified fan fic, too?).
However, I’ve leaned into my talent—write what you know. I’ve always expressed my life, experiences, and flaws through writing. Journaling about my desire to write a memoir started over a decade ago, and even my therapist at the time encouraged me.
At 24, I knew I could write a memoir about my crazy dating life. Thank goodness I waited and didn’t write it then because not long after, I met and fell in love with Phil. That’s the most epic love story of all time! I’m glad people will have to pay for that chapter.
Writing Extraordinary Machinewhile my mom was alive wouldn’t have been possible. I needed time and distance to reflect on our complicated relationship. Now, nine years after her passing, I’m ready to share my truth.
This past weekend, an indie singer-songwriter messaged me on Instagram and asked me to review his new single after reading my old music reviews on Snippets, my side blog. Snippets, my forgotten archive with 400+ reviews, still draws organic traffic. This reminded me that I already have a brand built over years of writing—Epinions, where I was a lead reviewer, video game articles, fan fiction, and more. Writing has always been my constant.
I’ve been writing online since I was 14 (yes, NSYNC fan fiction counts). Now, I’m refining Brittany Brown Writes.
Building My Writing Legacy
My new journals, waiting to be filled with stories, memoirs, and dreams.
This week, I’ve made more progress: my dream illustrator is designing the Extraordinary Machine book cover with my mockup in mind, I’m getting a custom logo created for my brand, I’ve registered for an ABN, and I’m applying for a grant (I didn’t know I could get money to fund my dream career! Still seems surreal). Phil’s Valentine’s Day gift—two beautiful journals for my ‘new career’—was the sweetest reminder that I’m embracing who I’ve always been.
I’m ready. When someone asks what I do, I’ll hand them my business card with a QR code linking to my website, where my books, reviews, and blogs will live. By day, I handle complaints. By night, I am Brittany Brown Writes—a writer—true to this from the start. ✨
🗨️ I’d love to hear from you! Drop a comment below if you’ve ever battled imposter syndrome or have dreams you’re finally pursuing. Let’s inspire each other!
Jimi thinks he’s my co-author. Honestly, he’s earned it with all the ‘help’ he gives me while I write.
First and foremost—I want to thank everyone for the massive outpouring of love, support, and encouragement on my first excerpt from Extraordinary Machine (more on that title below!).
Every comment, every message, every word said to me in person truly touched me. You reaffirmed my belief that sharing my story and publishing this book (and the next!) is the right path. 🙌
I’ve also had a few people mention they were hesitant to read the excerpt since it’s from Chapter 6, thinking it might be a spoiler. Don’t worry—it’s not! 🚫 I won’t be sharing anything that ruins the full experience. Just small glimpses to give you a taste of what’s to come—and of course, my writing style. ✍️✨
📋 What I’ve Accomplished So Far
I officially started this project on January 25, 2025 (though, to be honest, I’ve been writing bits and pieces since June 2020—and journaling since 2004). 🗓️📝 Since then, I’ve:
🔍 Endlessly researched the self-publishing journey
📝 Came up with my book titles
🎨 Potentially secured an illustrator for Extraordinary Machine’s cover
🛠️ Learned to use new tools to assist with my writing
🧬 Dug deeper into family history
💔 Relived a lot of painful memories and trauma—but worked through them!
🤝 Reconnected with old friends who I’m writing about
😴 Lost a ton of sleep
🧠 Gained a ton of wisdom about myself
I’m serious about this. When people hear, “I’m writing a book,” I know some think, “Oh, sure…” 🙄
But this has been my lifelong dream. 💫 Writing is my passion, sharing my story is my mission, and being a published author is my goal. 💖
🎉 The Title Reveal
Here’s a mockup of what Extraordinary Machine might look like on your bookshelf someday…ignore the AI mess, my illustrator will do a much better job!
I’ve been pacing myself this past week—making more time for my husband, my cats, my friends, and myself. 🐱💑 But I’m still as focused, motivated, and inspired as ever. And now…
I’m ready to share the title of my memoir about me and my mom.
It’s called “Extraordinary Machine: A Memoir of Trauma and Resilience.”
The title is a nod to one of my favorite songs by Fiona Apple. 🎶 It’s become a life motto for me, especially these lines:
If there was a better way to go, then it would find me I can’t help it, the road just rolls out behind me Be kind to me, or treat me mean I’ll make the most of it, I’m an extraordinary machine
I’ve had a hard life. I’ve had terrible things happen to me. But I always get back up, dust myself off, and try again (shoutout to Aaliyah). 🎤✨ No matter what happens to me or around me, I come back out on top. 👑
And that encapsulates my story—my trauma, my resilience. 💥💜
🗓️ What’s Next?
I’ll be updating here regularly. I’ve designed a schedule:
📅 1st Saturday of every month: A book excerpt (either from Extraordinary Machine or my dating memoir—btw, I named that one way back in 2009, but I’ll reveal it later). 😉
📅 3rd Saturday of every month: A personal update about my writing and self-publishing journey. ✍️✨
💥 Plus, a few spontaneous posts in between (like today’s!).
I hope you stick around for it all. I hope you cheer me on. I hope you keep me motivated. I hope you keep me grounded. 💕
Thank you all again—your support means the world. 🌍💜
💬 What part of my writing journey are you most curious about? Drop a comment below—I’d love to hear from you! 👇😊
My mother always taught me to be proud of being Black—but also to know the world wouldn’t always see me as I saw myself. This photo, with her wearing a ‘Jesus Is a Black Man’ shirt, captures so much of what she instilled in me. This moment, and many like it, shaped the memoir I’m writing today.
My mother taught me many things—some I carry with me, and some I’ve rejected. One of the biggest life lessons was about race, identity, and survival.
She wanted me to be proud to be Black, but she also wanted me to know that being Black meant the world wouldn’t always see me as I saw myself.
And so, she prepared me the best way she knew how.
Code-Switching and Other Race Lessons from Mom
Mom taught me a lot about race. Obviously, we’re Black. We should be proud to be Black. We’re descended from Africa, Jesus was a Black man, we have the best music, the most rhythm, the best fashion sense, and the most fabulous hair—and everyone in society wants to copy us.
But there was also this underlying (and sometimes blatant) feeling of not wanting to be Black—at least, not the “typical“ kind of Black. There was this constant reframing of our Blackness—we’re Black, but we’re not that kind of Black. We speak proper English. We’re well-educated. We don’t live in the ‘hood. We’re not ghetto.
“Life is hard enough because we’re Black,” she’d explain. “Don’t give anyone a reason to make it harder.”
It was confusing as a child. We were Black and proud, but my mom dyed her hair honey-blonde and spoke like a white woman when she took important phone calls.
From a young age, Mom drilled into me the art of code-switching long before I knew there was a name for it. It started with my name, actually. Mokie picked it out—she was 12 and named me after her favourite Alvin and the Chipmunks character, naturally—but Mom co-signed it because it sounded like a white name. How many Black girls do you know named Brittany? I don’t know any.
Mom said a white-passing name was ideal for navigating our world. I’d never have a teacher stumble over my name like they did the LaShauntas and Creontas in my class. Most importantly, when I got older, I’d never have a future employer skip over my résumé, deciding they didn’t want Jhermanique working in their corporate office.
“There’ll never be a President Shaniqua,” she’d say smugly. “But there can be a President Brittany Brown.”
Then there was how to speak. Mom drilled it into me young: When we’re out in public with normal people, don’t use slang, speak politely, and bump your tone up a few octaves so you sound pleasant and unopposing. Not that lower timbre I’d naturally use.
I saw her do it firsthand—when she was on the phone late at night, laughing with her best friend, Anita, it was all, “Girrrrrl!” and “Ain’t that some bullshit!”
But at my school’s parent-teacher conferences? She was dignified and refined—she sounded like a meek white secretary. “It’s so lovely to meet you, Mr. Mayer; Brittany speaks highly of you as her teacher.”
Looking back, it kind of makes me sad—being told I could be myself but also not be myself. That the way I was born, the way everyone else who looked like me existed, was something that needed to be hidden or masked.
But I know it came from a place of experience, of wanting to shield me from the things she’d faced. And it’s probably a much more universal experience than I realised. We all know the world is harder when you’re a minority. And in the United States—a country built on the backs of enslaved Black people? It was even harder.
When Nana, Troy, and Mom first bought a home in Bakersfield, it was the early ’70s—technically past the Jim Crow era, after Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. But racism didn’t just disappear because laws changed. The KKK still burned a cross on their lawn. They still threw a rock through their window. Parts of Bakersfield were still segregated for much of Mom’s childhood.
So I understood she was trying to protect me.
It just didn’t work.
Mom placed me in predominantly white schools growing up. It was intentional—they had better facilities and curriculum, and I think, in her eyes, less chance of me falling in with the wrong crowd.
But I was always the odd one out. The one Black kid in a sea of white and beige. I didn’t belong with them, and they were sure to remind me.
“Eww, why is your hair like that? It looks like snakes,” some girl sneered about my braids in 5th or 6th grade.
Another time, a girl grabbed the end of my braids and noticed the tip was burnt—that’s what you do to hair extensions to keep them from unravelling. “Oh my God, did you burn your hair?!” she gasped, nose wrinkled in disgust.
“It’s not my real hair….” I muttered, pulling my braid back.
“It’s not?! Did you shave someone’s hair and put it in yours?”
“No,” I sighed, exhausted, even though I was only nine. “They’re called extensions. It’s fake hair.”
One day, a boy floated over at the local pool with a cheeky grin. “Brittany, I think one of your braids fell out!” he teased.
Mortified, I looked over at his hand, but he held up a stick.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the Black kids didn’t accept me either.
Usually, the white schools Mom enrolled me in weren’t in our neighbourhood, so she’d use a friend’s address or whatever loophole she could find to get me in.
But one year, she couldn’t cheat the system. She had to enrol me at the local school after our latest move. The duplex we lived in was in the ghetto (and I truly mean ghetto—our unit was overrun with cockroaches, instilling a lifelong fear in me, and there was a drive-by shooting a few blocks away just weeks after we moved in). The school was predominantly Black.
These weren’t Black kids taught to code-switch. They weren’t named after ’80s cartoon characters. And they did not like me at all.
“Why you talk like a white person?” a girl bluntly asked me on my first day.
“I don’t know…I just…talk this way.”
Soon, a little clique of girls started a rumour that I thought I was better than them because I was bookish, well-spoken, and “acted white.”
One girl, in particular, hated me. She’d mutter threats in class under her breath, throw things at me when the teacher wasn’t looking, and one day after school, she tried to jump me. She followed me home, taunting me and throwing things at my back.
Crying, I went home to my mom and told her. “The Black kids hate me. The White kids hate me.”
A few weeks later, she pulled me out of the school, and we moved again. “This neighbourhood is too ghetto, anyway.”
I never got away from this feeling.
I had a brief reprieve at the start of high school in Sacramento. I got into a gifted school with smart, well-spoken Black kids like me, whose parents also taught them how to code-switch.
I joined the Black Student Union and made my first real Black friends. Our school was diverse. We weren’t judged for being Black—not by each other, not by the other kids. We could be Black and also like rock music. Or watch Jackass. Or date white kids and no one cared.
But then we moved to Reno.
Reno is a very white place. If you see a Black person in public, it’s rare.
My high school had—maybe—five black kids. Two of them were related to one another.
There was no BSU. No real sense of belonging. There wasn’t overt racism, but
microaggressions were constant.
“I forget you’re Black sometimes. You’re just like us!” one of my (white) best friends told me, meaning well.
When I was in college, two older Latina women at work listened to rock music as we prepped the restaurant for opening.
“You know this song?” Betty asked incredulously as she heard me sing along.
“Yeah,” I said, shrugging as I peeled an onion. “I like this kind of music.”
Betty turned to Rosa, and they said something to each other in Spanish. Despite my four years of Spanish in high school, I couldn’t decipher it, but I could tell by their tone and the sassy looks on their faces that they were gossiping about me.
Laughing awkwardly, I asked Rosa, “Hey, what are you saying about me?”
Rosa set aside the lettuce she was working on and grinned ruefully. “Oh, nothing…Betty was just saying she didn’t know Black people liked this music. And I said you’re not really Black anyway.”
My ears grew hot. I wanted to ask, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” But another of my mom’s lessons was respectability politics. Push it down. Don’t be the stereotypical angry Black woman they expect you to be.
I just shrugged, said I liked all kinds of music, and returned to peeling the onions.
But later, I cried.
It wasn’t until 2020, after George Floyd was murdered and Black Lives Matter forced these conversations back to the forefront, that I felt brave enough to address anything publicly.
I made a Facebook post:
“The microaggressions (intentional or not) lead to bigger hatred, reinforcement of negative stereotypes, selfishness, ignorance. Those ‘I didn’t mean it that way’ comments continue to lead to diminishment, ignorance, and bigotry…flat-out racism. I can’t tell you the amount of ‘little’ things people have said to me (yes, even some of you I’m friends with on this very site) that were racially insensitive, hurtful, and based on stereotypes. I’ll give some examples:
People commenting on the way I talk. ‘You sound so well-educated.’
‘You act so white.’ Been told this my whole life.
There are so many more examples, but I’m mentally and emotionally tired.”
It got a lot of reactions. A lot of heartfelt ones. Some of the people who replied were guilty, thinking I was referring to them when I wasn’t. Some friends I had been talking about acknowledged it. Some ignored it completely.
That’s fine.
I wasn’t trying to assuage their white guilt anyway.
But Mom was always right—life is harder when you’re Black.
She never told me that sometimes, it’s hardest when you don’t fit into anyone’s expectations of what that means.
I’m Brittany Brown, and I’m so excited to have you here on my little corner of the internet. This blog is where I’ll be sharing the stories, thoughts, and reflections that shape my life as I work to self-publish my memoirs—a journey of love, loss, and personal transformation.
A Bit About Me: Memoir Writing, Family, and Self-Discovery
I’ve always been a storyteller. From a young age, I found comfort and meaning in writing. Whether it was journaling my innermost thoughts (both privately and publicly), writing fan fiction, working for my college paper, or getting paid to write about music and video games, writing has always been my escape.
As an expat living in Australia, I’ve experienced some pretty wild adventures. I moved across the world for love—yes, I met my husband on Twitter (trust me, it’s worth the read, and you can learn more in my memoirs!). As an only child growing up with an unmedicated, mentally ill single parent, I also faced heartache, trauma, and unique family dynamics—along with a fractured version of love.
I’ve gone through the highs and lows of relationships, overcoming trauma, and navigating the messy middle of adulthood. I’m currently working on not one but two memoirs—one about growing up with my mom, my family, and the weight of generational trauma, and another about my misadventures in love and dating. (It’s a mix of heartbreak and humour, promise!)
What You Can Expect Here: Raw, Real, and Ridiculous Moments
This blog is where I’ll share the raw, real, and sometimes ridiculous moments as I take this journey—finishing two memoirs simultaneously (it started as one, then I realised my story is too big), aiming to self-publish them, and embracing the joys and pain that come with it. And yes, you’ll probably see a few cat photos along the way.
I also plan to share teasers from my memoirs—something to whet your appetite and get you excited for the full release!
Join Me! Subscribe for Updates and Sneak Peeks
I invite you to subscribe to my blog so you don’t miss any updates, sneak peeks, or teasers from my memoirs. Let’s keep this journey going together! If you want to chat, ask questions, or share your own experiences, feel free to comment or reach out via my contact page. I love hearing from readers and fellow creatives who are on their own journeys of self-discovery, love, and healing.
Thank you for stopping by. I hope my stories bring a little light, laughter, or comfort into your life. I hope I touch you with my words. Let’s make this space one of connection and inspiration.
Stay tuned because the best stories are always the ones that are still unfolding—and I can’t wait to share mine with you.
